Over the last 2 years, I’ve noticed that I spend WAY more time carefully cataloguing my collections of digital media (games, anime) than actually experiencing those media.
I would spend months carefully renaming the files, grouping them into folders by franchise, creating watch order files, remuxing videos so they would only have one audio and one subtitle file, reencoding videos that I considered bloated, reencoding videos that had flac or 5.1 audio to opus stereo, putting all my files into a spreadsheet along with other information, etc. etc.
Today I realized that my obsession is pointless. I’m just wasting my life doing something that’s not enjoyable, instead of experiencing the media I’ve collected. Who am I making those neat-looking catalogues for? I will never pass on my collection to anyone. I am just lost in my unhealthy obsession instead of enjoying life.
So yeah. Today I’ve decided to stop wasting my time. I will keep archiving (because I believe that in the future, the governments will make it very difficult to share copyrighted media online), but I will stop trying to make my collection look nice and tidy.
I will also delete stuff that I’ve watched/played that I didn’t enjoy. I’ve come to a realization there’s no point archiving it if I’m never going to use it again.
Anyways, I hope this helps someone realize that obsessions with cataloguing your hoards are unhealthy and a waste of life.
Did you recently have a wake-up call that made you think death is coming soon? I have, and it made me re-evaluate my archiving, in the sense that:
(1) For me, it’s only worth organizing if I can find some memories later.
(2) There are some great tools like Hazel (on Mac) to auto-sort.
(3) Otherwise, it must be autotelic.
There is joy in being AUTOTELIC, when you enjoy the process of something for its own sake. No one else has to know or understand, as long as it matters to YOU!!! I want everyone who sees this to know this word, it’s very powerful and meaningful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotelic
Ahh yes, the “good will”.
I didn’t know there was a word for this. Can’t thank you enough.